There’s an oxymoron for you: “Rich Poet.” But the new fortunes of Emirati poet Saif Al Mansouri prove that with talent, grit, and a live television audience, truly anything is possible. The UAE show “Millionaire’s Poet,” in its sixth season, awarded $1.3 million (the Nobel Prize. for comparison, is $1.2 million) to winner Al Mansouri, and perhaps something even more valuable – a global audience of up to 70 million, actually tuning in.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire Poet?
Interview with Lisa See
Recommended listening: The Los Angeles Review of Books interviews author Lisa See.
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Run the Jewels
“I fought the urge to throw up in my hands as I asked myself, 'How the fuck did I get here?'” When you're a jewel mule, as Kayli Stollak describes in this piece for The Establishment (via Narratively), going through customs can be a little stressful. For more lurid tales of crime and aristocratic extravagance, see our own Matt Seidel's review of Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle.
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Donald Barthelme’s Reading List
The Believer posts a 2003 essay featuring Donald Barthelme's reading list, which came secondhand to Kevin Moffett, a self-professed non-reader: "Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books 'in no particular order, just read them,' which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do." (via The Paris Review)
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Ishiguro + Gaiman + Genre
"Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?" Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman discuss The Buried Giant, fantasy and genre for the New Statesman. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling's review of the novel.
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William Gibson’s Zero History
The New York Times reviews William Gibson’s new novel Zero History: “To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future...” Also: Douglas Gorney interviews Gibson for the Atlantic.
A Fake News Site Makes Fake Fake News. You Won’t Stop Laughing At What Happens Next
Courtesy of fake-news juggernaut The Onion, a new viral website honest about its purpose: "I think we see the ideal ClickHole reader as a hollow shell who exists purely to click on our content and then share that content with other hollow shells." (Also: the same technique on headlines, applied to books.)
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